Dads. Educators.

Month: December 2016

Sometimes I don’t enjoy learning new things. I like to be right. Sometimes knowing I’m about to fail drives me back to my comfort zone. I don’t like wasting time and money, neither of which I have in large quantities. So I’ll just sit back and rest in what I know. That’s not a good habit to model for my kids.

In the last couple years, I’ve started making breakfast for my kids on most Saturdays. I don’t do a lot of cooking and rarely is it healthy, as evidenced by the Flipboard magazine I curate related to the topic. Making pancakes has been a been a great opportunity for me to try something new that helps make memories for our family. I’ve learned a lot about my kids – make some good, basic pancakes and just add whip cream. Maybe add some chocolate chips. Make them too fancy and run the risk of them not being eaten. Earlier this fall we mixed in some doughnuts, but for Christmas we tackled a breakfast food my wife and I had long been scheming to conquer – the big, fluffy, frosted cinnamon roll.

We’ve got some opportunity to improve, but the toughest critics (the kids) gave some great reviews. It felt great to be able to share these with my family on Christmas morning.

We also made a few more Christmas items than normal this year. Actually, I’ve never made anything like we did this year. We created stacked present decorations for our front porch, painted a “joy” sign out of some old wood we had in our garage that also went out front, and two Christmas decorations we gave to grandparents as presents.

Both the breakfast foods and Christmas presents have given me plenty of opportunities to model learning new things with my kids. I try to talk through both struggles and successes with whoever is helping. Our second Christmas present didn’t turn out so well because of some old semi-gloss. So we’ll be re-making it this week. We talked about what we learned from our experience and what we can do to improve. I’ve tried to be a good model in hopes that they can learn from these experiences and are able to struggle through their own new learning in the future.